Gradle for Android at Twitter HQ

It’s been a great time being here in the Bay Area, as the weather here has been nothing but stellar. Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity to attend a Gradle for Android event over at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. It was quite the attendance, as 300 developers were present for the event. The speakers for tonight’s event was Hans Dockter (founder of Gradle), as well as Twitter engineers Jonathan Le and Jake Ouellette.

For those that are unfamiliar with Gradle, Gradle is a build system that has been recently gaining a lot of traction among developers. Back at Google I/O earlier this year, Google announced that Gradle would be integrated into their new Android Studio IDEAJ-based IDE. As Gradle for Android is still quite new, along with Android Studio still essentially considered a beta product, it’s still a work in progress, with Android developers encountering some minor issues with building their apps.

Hans Dockter gave an overview of Gradle, along with demonstrating it’s build capabilities and functionalities in Android Studio. Dockter also talked about what to expect from Gradle as it’s tools mature for the Android platform. Along with Hans, Jonathan Le and Jake Ouellette spoke about their experiences with Gradle for their roles at Twitter.

Le, being the designer of the build system for the Android version of Twitter, discussed the process they went through to implement Gradle, as well as comparing the end results of Gradle versus their previous build tools they used for Twitter 1.0 – 4.0. Le noted that with Gradle, build times were significantly reduced, to roughly around 20-30 seconds versus 2 minutes with their old build tools. Ouellette, flying down from Seattle, also offered his experiences with Gradle in Crashanalytics.

Overall, it was a great event to learn more about Gradle for Android, along with being able to meet with many of the local Android developers here in San Francisco. I will update this post at a later time with a YouTube URL of this event, as Twitter will be making the video of this event available to the public.